¹ Relatively speaking, of course. By the helter-skelter, willy-nilly, pell-mell, and otherwise generally reduplicative measure of Internet Time™ in the Internet Age™, 17 years is forever. For true devotees of SpecGram, it is, at most “a spell”.

SpecGram has an internal system of ranks for the longevity of subscriptions, with those of the greatest antiquity having been bequeathed down through the generations. The barest outline of the system of ranks and sub-ranks, based on subscription length in years, is presented below:

² Cicadas returning every seventeen years makes their visits a smidge more than three times as frequent as those of the Grammar Entelechy. By coincidence, cicadas are also slightly more than three times as attractive as the representatives of the Grammar Entelechy, and easily three times as welcome to visit.

Less coincidentally, our editorial strategy for dealing with the Grammar Entelechy is similar to the cicada’s reproductive strategy for dealing with their antagonists: predator satiation. Cicadas inundate their attackers with more prey than they can eat; SpecGram overwhelms the Grammar Entelechy with more interns than it can rip souls from.

³ Worried you might be an uncareful reader? You probably are, but if you checked the footnotes there’s at least some hope for you.

⁴ That, of course, is a lie. I would love to do that, especially while turning on the sprinklers and releasing the hounds.

⁵ This is arguably not even hyperbole. Though they scatter like vermin⁶ when I come into their holding pen each morning, I can always corner a few of them. I ask them to make a simple philological argument, and those that fail to do so—which is all of them, by the way—are ejected from the building.⁷ Since a SpecGram internship is clearly more valuable than their worthless lives, Q.E.D.

⁶ As vermin will.

⁷ The engineering interns have suggested using a trebuchet for literal ejection, but the legal interns have made a convincing argument that doing so is unlawful. The philosophy interns suggested that it was also immoral, at which point the legal interns implied that using the trebuchet on philosophy interns might be a legal grey area.

⁸ i.e., philology, as previously discussed.

⁹ The worst use actual electronic computers to do their work, but even those who require less powerful computational aids—such as pencil and paper—are still an embarrassment.

¹⁰ Admittedly Green Linguarian is not the greatest cinematolingual achievement of a generation or anything. I even gave it a fairly poor review—1.5 out of 5 Stones—almost ten years ago. But these whippersnappers haven’t even heard of it. Its awfulness has aged like a fine whine, and these pipsqueaks cannot appreciate it.

¹¹ That is, the ones whose keys to the executive washroom we are unable to reclaim, whether for contractual or pure practical reasons—old fogey strength is real!

¹² See footnote 3, if you haven’t already.

¹³ Actually, probably not—they are all a bunch of pains in my derrière. But the psychology interns claim that it may be better for my own mental health to cut them some slack. I remain unconvinced.

¹⁴ Seventeen years underground for the cicadas, the rest of the summer in the work pits for the interns, the rest of the afternoon in the Napatorium Emeritus for the old fogeys.

¹⁵ The Editorial We, of course. I’ll be lounging along the placid shores of the [REDACTED] Riviera with a favored subset of the Editorial Board, while the Lesser Editors and interns work double shifts. C’est la vie.

¹⁶ The EU legal interns inform me that, due to the failure of the Speculeave Grammaretreat initiative (a.k.a. SpexitGramexit), I have to inform you that it is only a “European August Vacation” if you are primarily employed in one of the August-Vacationing Regions of Europe. Otherwise, it is just a sparkling month-long vacation.